rufeepeach:

tjmystic:

rufeepeach:

evs14u:

rufeepeach:

The Germans in Wonder Woman are not Nazis.

I just saw a troubling comment on a gifset of Antiope and her badass three-arrow stunt shot at the three german soldiers on the beach. I love that moment as much as anyone. However, this comment referred to her ‘killing Nazis’. And those men were not Nazis. 

Wonder Woman is set in WW1. Hitler would not come to power for over a decade after WW1 ended. Fascism had not yet become a political force in Europe. In fact, Germany’s treatment as a defeated aggressor instead of as an equal party in the armistice negotiations – and later the Treaty of Versailles – despite the Allies’ equal culpability for the war, directly contributed to the rise of fascism and nationalism in Germany.

Stop calling the German soldiers in Wonder Woman Nazis. One of the greatest tragedies of WW1 is that the soldiers on both sides of the trenches were hungry, young, sick, poor men, who had no stake in the war. This article talks about the experiences (at least early in the war) of both sides on the Western front meeting on no man’s land and finding little difference between one another. 

There’s a lot to love about Wonder Woman, and I very much enjoyed it. I also loved the points in the movie when the violence done by Americans and British – such as when Diana speaks to Chief about the death of his people – were addressed as well, but they were brief. The presentation of Germans As The Bad Guys – especially since Aries’ influence was inconsistent as a plot point – has led to people mistakenly reading it as a movie about Nazis, when the Nazis did not exist in 1918. A WW1 setting does not sustain a narrative of one side being ‘heroic’ and the other ‘villainous’, especially if one takes into account the atrocities both sides had committed during the quarter century leading up to the armistice. It troubles me that this movie allows WW1 German soldiers to be read as Nazis. 

Please stop referring to Nazis in the context of Wonder Woman.

THANK YOU

The American media has grabbed onto this image of all German bad guys, so 99% of all german characters, are Nazis. In the, it worked in Indiana Jones so why not here, type of way.  

This is basic knowledge, and two seconds of googling would have given you the correction. Hollywood has this tendency of promoting very basic us v. them movies. It’s the all awesome Captain America vs. the all bad Hydra, which does the same white washing of history. War doesn’t work like that. It’s more complicated. WW2 included. See here for a whole post on that. 

You get this warped sense of what it means to be German. You want to know how I know? I had seniors in HIGH SCHOOL asking me if everyone in my family were Nazis. 

Hollywood insists that one side, usually America, is always good and the other side is always bad. This erases the complexity of war. It allows us to put it in a neat little box and just stow it away. 

Lets also stay away from calling the German army in WW2 Nazis. People like promoting this image that all Germans in WW2 were Nazis when that wasn’t the case. The German army in WW2 or die Wehrmacht was just that, an army for a state. Separate from the party that had overtaken that state. People seem to confuse the Wehrmacht with the SS. 

While America was living in the Gatsby era (roaring 20s), Germany was going through a great depression. Having to battle hyperinflation and the Allies continuously humiliating them. People felt belittled and left behind. So they looked to a strong man. A man that would restore the integrity of Germany and return it to its former glory. Sound familiar? Hitler was democratically elected because he played on people’s fears and pain. 

If you want to watch a show with a good representation of WW2, watch Band Of Brothers. For a taste watch this final speech by a German general to his troops at the end of the war. If you want more there is a fantastic documentary series called World At War, most of which should be on Youtube.  

TL;DR: History, like the present, is a lot more complicated and fascinating than Hollywood would like you to believe. 

A+++  addition to my post yes good

This is completely playing the devil’s advocate here, but… what does that mean about Trump supporters? Or ISIS vs. the rest of the world? I know that, fundamentally, there are good and bad people on all sides of every war, but, on this website especially, we like to black-and-white everything. Where do we draw the line between sympathetic people who were lied to and evil people who wanted an evil leader?

…….I mean people seem to be misinterpreting my post as claiming that there are NEVER better and worse moral arguments in international conflict. I got accused in a reply of ‘whitewashing’ Nazis. Which… no? This post is purely about how Nazis didn’t exist in the era depicted in Wonder Woman. That’s a historical fact. 

My original point was that that us vs them, good vs evil, Hollywood stereotype presentation does not work in movies about WW1 specifically, in particular Wonder Woman. Because of the specific experience, history, and circumstances of the First World War, it should be impossible to present a clear good/evil dichotomy because of the specific history of the conflict. And despite some awesome elements to the contrary – like that last scene where Ares is defeated and the German soldiers take off their helmets – that was the narrative presented in the majority of the movie. 

WW2 is very different to WW1 because of the clear crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes committed by the Axis. It should be impossible to present a WW2 narrative that doesn’t show a clear moral difference, or make clear the atrocities committed by the Axis powers. In no way is ANYTHING in this post arguing that there are NEVER morally better and worse sides in a war. Anyone who reads it that way is seeing something that isn’t there.

However, the presentation of American forces in WW1 as ‘good guys’ fighting ‘bad guys’ is historical revisionism – not because there weren’t good men in the American army, but because there was no significant moral difference between them and their enemy. The reasons for WW1 were extremely complex and stemmed from a century of economic competition and colonial ambition within Europe. None of the parties had clean records. I think a lot of people think WW2 was just a repeat of WW1. Nothing could be further from the truth: they were two completely different historical episodes, with different tensions, histories, contexts, and outcomes. 

A lot of American/Hollywood action cinema has a tendency to stray into American propaganda. It likes to portray American soldiers as heroes, to the point that being an American soldier is shorthand for ‘the good guy’ in 90% of these movies. Just as, in movies set pre-1950, ‘German soldier’ means ‘bad guy’. American flags are used as visual shorthand for ‘good’, and proto-Nazi imagery is used for ‘bad’. Think about the scene at the end of Wonder Woman, set at a camp in Germany surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers, and flood lights, with a number of threatening German officers on patrol. That scenery immediately draws comparisons to WW2 imagery of German wartime camps – however, in many respects it is inaccurate for WW1 (flood lights, for example, or the use of planes for anything other than photography, both of which are accurate for 1941, but not 1918). The purpose is to make the audience immediately equate this compound with ‘evil bad people who need to be stopped’. That equation is made because we’re all familiar with WW2 movies, and we know this setting from there. This imagery is revisionist when the movie is set fourteen years before Hitler’s rise to power, and twenty years before the outbreak of WW2.

ALSO that propaganda element leads to categorising whole swathes of history as battles of good vs evil, which ignores the complicated histories that lead to the rise of evil. It leads to the ‘it could never happen here’ mentality that allowed Trump to rise to power. Because America = good, so Good Americans could never fall pray to Evil Ideologies. Germans, however, were always Bad and Evil, even in WW1 before Hitler even formed his political party, so it’s clear why THEY fell to Evil, where as WE are Good and never will. That reasoning is reductive and dangerous. 

While presentations of history absolutely should not shy away from moral judgements – the Nazis were evil and absolutely have to be presented as such – they should also avoid over-simplification. Like using shorthand German = Evil, American = Good dichotomies in a movie set 14 years before Hitler came to power.

If you want a good presentation of Nazi Germany as complex and understandable, which also doesn’t shy away from the necessary moral judgements, Hitler: The Rise of Evil starring Robert Carlyle is a good start. You can call something evil, you can make someone the villain, without making simplistic American propaganda or removing the historical context. 

Finally, it’s worth noting again that the treatment of Germany as The Bad Guys at the Treaty of Versailles, despite those complex and multilateral reasons for the war breaking out, contributed to the rise of Hitler. Germany was bankrupted by reparations payments, their government was entirely restructured by the Allies, and their economy was completely crippled. Nazi ideology was created out of the ashes of WW1: the National Socialist party didn’t even exist in 1918. It is completely inappropriate to talk about Nazis in the context of a movie set pre-Versailles, which Wonder Woman is.

And this matters, because understanding history and its complex lessons is vital for facing current and future challenges. You can seek to understand the rise of Nazism without condoning it. You can enjoy watching Cap punch Nazis in the face – hell, I do, and I don’t consider it problematic at all! But you gotta understand that the Nazis didn’t come from nowhere. It is problematic when an otherwise awesome and highly influential American blockbuster action movie gets relevant, modern history this wrong, to the point where people seem confused as to which war it’s set in. It really, really matters how we present this period of our history. Especially since, apparently, the circumstances and history of WW1 isn’t common knowledge.